A reporter called
me on Sunday to ask me what I thought the national mood was in the wake of the
Columbia disaster.

Getting called
like this is becoming increasingly odd and distant from even a generous accounting
of my expertise. Ive commented in the past for reporters working on popular
culture, nostalgia and televisionIve sort of become Robert J. Thompsons
understudybut now Im getting all sorts of general questions about
the national mood, reality programming and about anything else you care to name.
Im cool with it: most of the reporters who call are interesting people,
often working on interesting stories. I dont feel especially expert on
some of these queries, but if Im going to blog, I might as well talk as
well.

On the national
mood, at any rate, there is something to be said. Not what that mood is,
but what it means to ask that question. I take it for granted that there is
no such thing as a single national mood about the Columbia disaster
(or many other events). Almost all of us felt sadness about it, of course. In
speaking of a general mood, however, we affirm first what Benedict Anderson
noted about nations, that they seek to assert a simultaneity of experience through
mass media, that we are all living in the same moment, and second, we propose
to find meaning in the unfolding of events, to impose orderly narratives on
the disorderly progress of history.

Seven lives lost
in space do mean more to me than seven lives lost in seven different car crashes.
No insult to the victims of car accidents, but we place death and tragedy within
larger narratives and structures of feeling all the time. My fathers death
was more devastating to me by far than the death of my grandfather, not merely
because of a closeness between my father and I (and a distance between myself
and my grandfather) but because of the suddenness and unexpected nature of my
fathers death. The picture in my mind, the powerful story, is about him
dying alone on the floor of the men's room at his law firm office, an hour before
anyone else got to work. That picture matters vastly more to me than the simple,
banal, predictable and statistically ordinary fact that he died of a heart attack
brought on by a lifetime of Type-A intensity and stress. The death of one boy
from starvation and abuse in New Jersey has a different meaning to me than the
death of a well-loved and well-cared for child in an accident: both tear at
my heart, but they are different stories, different meanings. Similarly, some
of the ways that Americans have seen meaning in the Columbia disaster make sense
to me even if I dont think theyre a literal description of the hidden
causes of the crash.

Like many Americans
of my generation, space exploration plays a very special role in the architecture
of my imagination and aspirations. A loss of astronautsespecially when
it threatens the space programs futurehas a sharp and special pain
to it. (Even though I freely concede that the shuttle program and the International
Space Station were and are a mistake within the overall context of the space
program.) Of course, there are also very real and sharply pointed discussions
to be had about causes and procedures, in which we might hope to understand
and so prevent future disasters.

In a more general
sense, it was hard not to feel that this event was the sad overture to what
is almost certain to be a year overflowing with tragedy, that the geist of our
time reached out and ripped the Columbia from the skies as a foreshadowed taste
of funerals to come. You can have that sense without judging this taste of bitter
loss, just as farmers sometimes sense in their bones a season of coming storms.
What can you do but endure? Obviously there is no real connection: coincidence
is usually just that. We connect events like an artist connects lines and shades
on a canvas. You find such a picture of synchronicity resonant or you do not.
It's not wrong or right in some absolute sense.

This is why I find
conspiracy theories offensive at moments like this. Partly theyre offensive
simply because they're such badly conceived arguments. Whether its the
Columbia or Paul Wellstones plane crash, to explain the event through
conspiracy is either to assert that everything we are seeing about the event
through our normal channels of information is wrongin which case the conspiracy
theorists own sources of information are equally suspector the conspirators
possess technological, organizational and logistical abilities that vastly outstrip
anything we ordinary folk witness in everyday life. In either case, there isnt
any point to talking about it if its true, because if its true,
theres nothing to do about it anywayits like human beings
complaining about the power of the Olympian Gods. If we can do somethingif
opposition is viablethen the conspirators dont possess the powers
attributed to them, in which case the conspiracies attributed to them cant
possibly be true.

The deeper reason
I find conspiracy explanations of something like the Columbia accident or Wellstones
plane crashing offensive is that they misunderstand the search for meaning.
Finding meaning and connections in events is about interpreting them imaginatively,
about creatively knitting together the separate strands of time that divide
our lives, a gift to others groping in the random darkness of time. A conspiracy
theorist takes an interpretation and mistakes it for an empirical statement.
You can say, Wellstones death makes it feel as if the Democrats
are cursed, a dark cloud of misfortune and malevolent disregard hanging over
them. Thats completely different from saying, The Bush Administration
conspired to have his plane crash: youre not talking about what
something means then, but making a statement about what is true and not true.

The standards are
different in that case. Its human to try and make things make sense. Its
stupid to leap from that to claiming that everything happens for a reason, always
already at the willful command of some sinister structure whose visible face
appears to us only and accidentally in oblique glimpses of tragedy and suffering.
Sometimes dreams just die, and souls are lost. Sometimes the heedless rush of
events masters us, rather than the other way around.